Sharon Charde • Branch in His Hand

From the Critics:

In Branch in His Hand, a boy falls to his death and a mother sings a requiem in poems. The reader will not ever forget the Italy that he loved, or the wall from which he fell. Charde takes us to Italy, to the wall: "A fissure in the wall like / a wound . . ." and to the sea, in search of healing. In these brutally honest, beautiful poems, we face the death of one who is dearly loved, and recognize, as the poet says, "that grief is at least part of what you / will grow into."
   • Pat Schneider
     Author of Writing Alone and with Others and founder of Amherst Writers & Artists

To sing songs of praise for Sharon Charde's bold new collection, Branch in His Hand, would tell only half the story. Our songs should be those of gratitude and of astonishment as well-gratitude for her courage and her clarity, and astonishment that she is able to lead us into the darkest night of loss, and in many places suspend us there long enough for us to remember how time is suspended when we are grieving, and at the same time somehow push and pull us through it into a place where the first dawn of a new day has always been there waiting for us. With deliberate, dangerous control, Charde takes us on her own personal journey through death, despair, isolation, and, ultimately, transformation, but what is remarkable is that at some mysterious point in the book she gives us the reins and the journey becomes our own. Not since Marie Howe showed us in What the Living Do in times of unspeakable grief and suffering has a writer so bridged the most intimate and universal places where death finds us and brings us to our knees and then raises us back up again. Charde teaches us, poem by beautiful poem, that the only thing a serious poet can do with the unsayable is say it. With her extraordinary emotional integrity, exquisite eye for detail, and sometimes painful precision with language, Charde teaches us what it is like to lose one's heart to loss and to find it there as well.
   • Lisa Starr
     Poet Laureate of Rhode Island

Branch in His Hand begins with the author learning of her son's sudden death and then records the years that follow. With unswerving directness and skill, Sharon Charde chronicles the details of how a particular death is woven into a particular life. With a daring lack of sentimentality, she makes a universal tale that has the impact of powerful drama. I dare you to read this book.
   • Karen Chase
     Author of Kazimierz Square, Bear, and Land of Stone

Praise for Four Trees Down From Ponte Sisto
How can we live through the unbearable? Every day we see it on the news, or hear it from neighbors-and then it happens to us. Sharon Charde has walked through what she couldn't bear and borne it-and here is the crucial evidence-these spare, accurate, fiercely unsentimental poems make a shining bridge of tears. We can stand on this miraculous bridge-and if the view breaks our hearts-good-it might also break them wide open.
   • Marie Howe
     Author of The Good Thief, What the Living Do, and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time

About the Author:

Sharon has studied with Natalie Goldberg, Sharon Olds, Brenda Hillman, and Marie Howe. She has been published in Caduceus, Calyx, The Comstock Review, Crosscurrents, The Homestead Review, Illya's Honey, The Maryland Poetry Review, Ping Pong, Poeticas, The White Pelican Review, The Women's Studies Quarterly, and Voices In Italian America; in an anthology on marriage, Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge; and a mother-baby anthology, Not What I Expected. She has received Honorable Mentions in contests sponsored by The Maryland Poetry Review, Gulf Stream Magazine and The Connecticut Poetry Society, and was chosen finalist in the 2001 and 2004 Comstock Review Contest, and the 2003 Hill-Stead Museum's Sunken Garden Poetry Contest, and won third prize in the 2003 Connecticut River Review competition. Her full-length collection, Branch In His Hand, won Honorable Mention in the 2005 Bordighera Bilingual Poetry Book Publication Competition. Flume Press, California State University, published her first prize-winning chapbook, Bad Girl At The Altar Rail, in September 2005. Six of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In 2006 her second prizewinning chapbook, Four Trees Down From Ponte Sisto, was published by Dallas Community Poets Press.

In the fall of 2005, Sharon was presented with the first Inge Morath Award given by The Trinity Arts Series, the University of Connecticut Torrington Campus, The Litchfield County Writer's Project and Zeeland Productions, for her creativity and the significant impact she has had on social development in the arts. On April 10, 2007, she was presented with the Making a Difference For Women Award given by the Soroptimist International of Connecticut, a worldwide organization for women in management and professions, working through service projects to advance human rights and the status of women, for her work with the young women of Touchstone.

She is mother to two sons, grandmother to three boys, and has lived in Lakeville, Connecticut, since 1970 with her husband, John.